Sunday, January 31, 2010

Whenever I read a thread in marketing forums I always need to remind myself that most of the posts are made by newbies. Nothing wrong with that. The Warrior Forum is a great place for newbies to learn how to make money on the Internet.

A topic often brought up is about how much marketers should pay writers to create articles for their websites. These people know that you can go to eLance or GetAFreelancer.com to get articles written for very low cost. How low? Maybe $2 per article.

But what you end up with is a $2 article.

Buying cheap articles and adding them to your website without reworking them never satisfy your blog or website visitor who is likely to exit immediately on seeing the crappy article. This will only increase your "bounce rate" (how many people stay on your website for less than a minute.

If you are in business to make a living then you better be prepared to write articles for yourself, if you can, or pay a good ghostwriter to do that. Even sites that are mainly pictures (porn sites come to mind) need good text copy around those pictures to get you to buy something.

I know a ghostwriter who charges 10 times what many other web writers do for a single article. But then, he spends as much time just researching the article than those other writers spend writing four or five articles.

Tip for writers: You can make some money writing cheap articles. If you are happy with a substandard living, go for it.

Tip for buyers: find the best ghostwriter that you can afford to write your articles. If you can't afford that, write your own articles or sales copy. The alternative is to find a different way to make a living.

Copywriting and grammar are both important components for successful SEO. There are plenty of crappy articles out there. Why? Because people want to try to spam the search engines. They don't care if the articles are read by their visitors. Such is life in the big city. You won't find that kind of article on this blog, though. Check out this guest post.

No system is perfect. There are always flaws and breakdowns thatwill occur, for any number of reasons. This holds true in theworld of online marketing and especially in the realm of the mostcommon web practice, copywriting.

Now we are not talking about the obvious mistakes here. Errors ofgrammar, syntax, spelling or revision are fairly obvious and canbe averted with a simple double-check by running your articlepast a colleague for critique. This article addresses broadererrors of philosophy or doctrine that can cripple an otherwisetechnically strong piece of copywriting.

Five Copywriting Mistakes You CAN Avoid

Mistake #1 - Missing your target audience

One of the most important points of any piece of writing is toaddress your intended audience. This is true for absolutely everytype of writing out there, without exception. Consider forexample that you're a writer specializing in culinary writing.You could submit the most well-written, elegant article oncoconut cream pies ever composed. You still would not get veryfar with this article if you tried to sell it to someone with acoconut allergy.

As is often the case, understanding your audience happens beforeand after you do the actual writing, making it a 'meta'principle (outside the actual task itself, but still related).Avoiding this mistake takes effort. Get in the habit of askingspecific questions of your clients, and researching relatedmaterial on their sites if available. Information will help youavoid targeting a piece to the wrong audience.

Mistake #2 - Going on and on and on and on...

The web is a fast-paced environment. Technology has increased thespeed at which machines can present information, and as a resultpeople expect to be able to process that information faster. Withso much out there available so quickly, why would anyone lingeron an article that takes too long to get to the point?

Write concisely, focusing on your topic and keeping the contentto a targeted word count. Ensure that each section is no longerthan necessary, to prevent boredom and disinterest.

Again, research is your greatest ally in this case. Knowing youraudience helps, as does being very familiar with your subject.Examine your sentences and see where you can cut down wordswithout destroying meaning.

Mistake #3 - Missing the call to action

A great deal of copywriting is done to promote products andservices of every stripe. Similarly, a great deal of copywritingdoesn't do much beyond presenting the basic information. Goodcopywriting should include a tangible call to action. Don't justoffer the user more information, invite them to 'Learn moreabout it here.'

Wishy-washy language is the weakness in this case. Most peopleconfuse simple statements such as 'You can learn more' withpowerful calls like 'Learn more.' The first is justinformative. All right, we can learn more, why should we? 'Learnmore and take control' is an imperative that gets peopleresponding.

Mistake #4 - Getting fancified and highfalutin

Contrary to what some people may think, there IS a place forjargon and technical terminology. That place exists within acommon frame of understanding. When two engineers trade talkabout ohms, resistance, current and capacity, these terms areintended to speed up understanding and improve their overallefficiency.

For example you could refer to 'the practice of using keywords,precise writing, and meta tags to improve search engine resultsfor websites.' This is cumbersome, so among those who understandyour reference, instead you can use the term Search EngineOptimization, or the acronym SEO.

The problem with jargon is that it is not universal. MentionNewtons to the average person, and you're talking about a snackcake. Mention them to a physicist, and you're discussingconcepts of universal gravitation. The term is valuable to thelatter, irrelevant to the former. The danger in copywriting isthe use of jargon in inappropriate contexts. In a generalizedpiece, jargon does not make you look clever, but rather arrogantor showy.

Restrict your use of jargon to appropriate times. If you have areasonable basis to believe others can understand it, go for it.If you find yourself thinking 'everyone SHOULD know what Imean,' stop and ask for advice.

Mistake #5 - Skipping the Headline

Attention spans are reducing even as our ability to processinformation increases. People want quick, catchy information andthey want it now. Too late, they've moved on. A headline is akey point in catching someone's attention, and all too often isneglected or slapped on without consideration.

A good headline should convey just enough information to let themknow what the article is about, yet be vague enough to generatetheir interest in reading further. Humorous headlines can be veryeffective, as can dramatic or ironic statements. Practice withheadlines, and make them an essential part of your writing,rather than an accessory.

Monday, January 25, 2010

When doing pay-per-click advertising (PPC), the most important aspect is your landing page. That's the place where you will either capture and keep your visitor's attention, or you will lose that potential customer forever.

Note that I did not say that making a sale is the most important aspect. That is true only when you are selling a single product (usually software or informational) that you can easitly describe and support with testimonials and well written copy (text).

Capturing the email address is the first and most important step in developing a relationship with your visitor, otherwise known as your "prospect." I think we should change the term to "targeted prospect" rather use that old, worn out "targeted visitor."

In the brick and mortar world, I teach my clients to treasure the phone call more than anything else done with the business website. For the Internet Marketer, I am beginning to lean toward a phone call instead of an email address. However, it is infinitely more difficult to get them to call you.

If you don't get the email address, they are gone forever. You won't have a chance to tell about your great products or ask them really important questions like what they thought about your website, why they didn't buy, what they need, what you can do for them.

It's like spending a lot of time and effort for absolutely nothing.

Keep in mind that the old "sign up for my newsletter" is not working very well. It just is not what they want in this world of thousands of email newsletters.

That is why you need an "opt-in" landing page. You have an opportunity to present an irresistable offer. How about a red hot report like "5 Sure Ways To Get the IRS To Audit Your Tax Form" during the tax season or in August "3 Reasons Why Your Child Can Fail Pre-School".

A good landing page can teach you a lot about what people are looking for. Using PPC (Pay Per Click -Google Adwords) you can do the testing you need to succeed.

The price to obtain your exciting free product is their email address. Capturing the email address is like finding a gold nugget in the cold stream.

Here are some examples of good landing pages. http://landingpageexamples.net/

Here is a nice long and very informative video to help you learn about landing pages.

Katrina Kurnit / Inside AdWords: New targeting options for mobile ads — If you've chosen to show ads on iPhones and other mobile devices with full internet browsers, you can now target specific mobile devices or carriers.

You can target Google mobile ads by location, but now Google is opening up two new targeting options for mobile ads running through AdWords. Ads shown on a mobile browser can now target by mobile device or by carrier.

It is important for your financial health, if you use Adwords, to understand the choices you have for keyword matches.

Google now has the ability to relate words such as "shoes" and "footware". But you, the advertiser, may not want to show up for "footware". With Broad Match Google can match just one word of your keyword phrase. For example, "mens shoes" could be matched with "mens dating services". Ich.

This video does a good job of explaining the problem of choosing "Broad Match".

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

You can be sucked into a forum conversation that is staged to get you to buy a product.

Here is how it works:

Two guys get together with the intention of generating a lot of comments about a forum subject.

Let's say the topic is "Offline marketing". This is a hot topic these days.

Conspirator #1 starts it off with a question: What services are you offering for monthly fees? (note: check his signature file that sells a report)

Conspirator #2 pipes in soon afterward: Here is my experience on how I earn $50K per money with offline marketing. He proceeds to tell us how he makes his money.

The posts pile up. Others are drawn into the conversation. Eventually you have a very long and windy "conversation" going on. The real purpose is to get you interested in the origianal conspirators to the point where you will check out what they are offering. Usually it is a report or a course about the topic.

Advice: watch out for this tactic. Look for exaggerated earnings. Remember that they welcome a flame retort from you because this enhances the conversation.

Here is another twist: sometimes the conspirators are just one person who is making posts for both.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Is a Catholic Church Pastor a businessman? Maybe not in the dictionary sense, but when it comes to keeping his Parish alive and well, he is the go-to guy, the CEO, the chief cook and bottle washer.

I am not particularly religious but I like to think I am spiritual. Do you understand how these two concepts diverge? That is a long intro to tell you that I don't attend church (any church) with awesome regularity. Don't get me wrong. I am not against going to church. I always get inspired when I attend a Sunday Mass (I was raised Catholic. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic as the saying goes).

I went to church this morning. At the end of Mass, the Pastor faced his crowd and said, "I get peeved by people who tell me that church lasts too long." He gave a short speech about how we spend tons of time in front of the TV watching sports and other stuff. Why complain when he asks us to spend at least one hour a week with God? That was his message and it hit me hard.

This fellow is a good salesman. He knows only a few people will take offense at a speech like this. He also knows that speaking to us and not at us is good for business, the church business, as it were. I may now go back to Mass sooner than later.

It never hurts to speak to your prospects and customers than speak at them.

"Salesman" is not a bad word. Over the years the word became tarnished. Keep in mind that we all need to be salespeople for our businesses in order for them to thrive.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

When you visit places like The Warrior Forum you read posts about how to quickly you can get listed in the search engines. They are missing the point.

Whenever I see those posts I can't help but think they are written by rookies. Why? If you have been around for a while you understand that it is more important to have good stuff on your website and that the search engines will eventually put up your website. Usually you can expect your website to appear within a week or two.

This leads me to think of how people continue to attempt to influence their search engine rank by using schemes. A "scheme" is a consistent effort to achieve a result but it is also, by definition, an action that does not quite fit the rules.

A good example is posting comments on blogs with the sole intention of getting backlinks to your website. Something tells me that this is wasted effort for the most part. I think you can obtain some initial benefit with this method, but my experience shows that it is time spent unwisely over the long haul.

I think you would be better off posting at Yahoo Answers.

The urge to get something done quickly is strong in human beings. Think about the last time you tried to rush though a needed job at home. Was the result satisfactory?

Google wants what is good for its users. That is as it should be, in my opinion. To try to scam the search engines is not a good scheme.

As a website owner, one of your top priorities is goingto be getting your site indexed and ranked by Google.People perform over 235 million searches a day with Google,so the potential to receive significant traffic from thissearch engine should be enough for you to invest the timeto make sure it's done right.

Google wants to fill its index with quality, error freewebsites that are beneficial and targeted to theirsearchers. Enter Google's Webmaster Central Tools .....http://google.com/webmasters . If you've never heard ofit, it's Google's way of helping you with your website'sindexing. Not too long ago, it went through a redesignand upgrade process which made it more useful andeasier to use than ever.

First thing you'll need to sign in with is a Googleaccount. Google requires an account to be able touse all of their free services, including Blogger andAnalytics, so if you don't have one, now's the time toregister.

If you have multiple websites to list, that's no problem.Up to 500 sites can be added all under one roof. Youwill need to perform what Google calls "site verification"for each site submitted. This proves to Google that youare the owner of the site before they release detailedinformation to you. At one time it was a lengthy processof cutting and pasting code into the head section ofyour index page or uploading a separate HTML file. Nowthey've streamlined the process and it's all done withone click of an email.

If you use Blogger.com, "Webmaster Tools" can be enabledfrom within the Blogger dashboard under tools/resources.Once your sites have been submitted, you'll have accessto a whole suite of useful tools. The website is brokenup into three main sections.

If your website has never received a decent ranking withGoogle, these numerous reports will help you in trackingdown the problem. It's truly an "eye opener" to see yoursite through the eyes of a search engine.

On the "Crawl Errors Page", any errors Google encounteredwhile crawling your site are revealed. The url's not listed,and the types of problems such as restricted by robots txt,url's that timed out, and unreachable url's will be uncovered.If numerous pages of your site are not indexed, Sitemaps canalso be submitted to help Google find and crawl all of thepages of your site.

If your website is not showing up in Google's index, or youthink it's being penalized for some reason, you can contactGoogle from within the "tools interface" with a "reconsideration"request. This will ask Google to take another look at yoursite. Before submitting, make sure you've cleaned up anyerrors, and that you're not in violation of any of Google'swebmaster guidelines.

Here's a small sample of some other tasks that can beperformed.

- Keyword Research: The keywords page lists the mostimportant words Google found when indexing your site.So you know what keyword/phrases your site is ranking for.

- Data can be downloaded in spreadsheet formatin order to be analyzed and tracked.

- Any RSS feeds can also be submitted as sitemaps.

- Parameter Handling- Allows you to tell Google whichurl's you want them to ignore.

- Emails from Google's Webmaster Tools can beforwarded to any email address you specify.

Contrary to popular belief, Google wants you to succeedonline which is why they give you the tools needed tofix any problems, and make your site a search engine'sindexing dream. That's not just good business for Google,it's good for your website too.-------------------------------------------------

I love articles the teach how to be more concise in or writing. This article shows how the "that" word can be eliminated. Read on...

Eliminate This Word From Your Ads Nowby Scott Bywater

I'm about to show you a way to make your copy flow better. And it's probably one of the easiest steps that you could ever take to improve your copy.

It involves cutting out the word "that" from your copy whenever it's unnecessary.

For example, the second sentence of this email reads...

"And it's probably one of the easiest steps that you could ever take."

when it could easily read...

"And it's probably one of the easiest steps you could ever take."

Notice how it flows better? Notice how the word "that" was unnecessary in this situation?

Ok, let's look at a few other situations that the word "that" is used?

Notice how I did it again - the word that could easily be cut out of the sentence above ;-)

Here's a few other examples:

There's no other way that you could get the same results as you will with product X.

How do I know that you can cut your accounting bills by up to 50%?

Did you know that your headline is the most important part of your advertisement?

... can you see how the word 'that' can be cut out of each of the examples above?

So here's what you need to do every time you write an ad or a sales letter.

Read through it and check for any instances you can see the word "that" where it is simply unnecessary. And then cut it out of your copy.

--------------------------------------------------------------------- As a direct response copywriter, Scott Bywater strives to educate business owners on how to generate more leads, get more of the "right type" of customers, differentiate themselves from their competition, and convert their leads into sales via his underground and "outside of the box" strategies. You can get his copywriting and marketing tips delivered to your inbox via his eye opening "Copywriting Selling Secrets" newsletter available athttp://www.copywritingthatsells.com.au/---------------------------------------------------------------------

And we were talking about a variety of different things when thetopic came up of "get rich quick" and I said to him "Do youknow anyone who has ever managed to get rich quick and withoutputting the effort in?"

He answered no.

Now we both have a friend who used to wish for just that.

He is still wishing.

So here's the next thing to think about when someone tries tosell you on the concept you can great untold riches by this timenext month.

Ask yourself...

Do you know anyone else who has managed to do this withoutputting in the effort?

Now of course, I know plenty of people who have createdincredible amounts of wealth - and often far faster than what theaverage person achieved.

But there's usually a few reasons for it -

1. They work incredibly long hours.

2. They have already had success in another venture and use theirknowledge and experience to plough into their new venture.

3. They never stop thinking about their venture. They arepassionate, excited, disciplined, etc.

One things is for sure, they are not working 4 hours a week andthen lying around at the beach the rest of the time.

As far as I can see, there aren't any shortcuts.

In fact, I believe the most important skill in creating wealth isdiscipline.

Sending out an email a day - discipline.

Calling past customers to ask them "how are things" -discipline.

Doing your planning every week - discipline.

Spending at least 1/2 hour a day on marketing - discipline.

Developing your systems and procedures - discipline.

In fact, I believe it's virtually impossible to succeed withoutsome form of discipline.

---------------------------------------------------------------------Scott Bywater is a direct response copywriter and the authorof "Cash Flow Advertising" and "More Customers Made Easy".Although Scott is accepting very few clients, he generouslyshares his experience on copywriting at his web site athttp://www.copywritingthatsells.com.au/---------------------------------------------------------------------

Click that link. It leads to a page with a series of videos about animals. In the featured video, a couple of young raccoons were found living inside a Pepsi machine. It touches the heart. Wild animals doing their best to survive in a human world.

I sent the link to my relatives. I am sure they will pass it on. The video is that good. And each time someone opens the link the Purina name is immediately viewed as well.